This has been a good weekend for Maggie. It warmed up today to the mid 40's, and rained quite a bit, so a lot of the snow has melted. We went for about an hour long walk today around the neighborhood. She is so amazingly good outside on the leash. She's beyond our wildest expectations for how she might be after training, let alone before. Hopefully this isn't something that changes after she starts to adapt to us and her new life. But for now anyway, she continues to be perfect on the leash. She doesn't get ahead of us, doesn't tug on the leash at all, and stops when we stop.

There is a lot of flooding on the streets today with all of the melt and rain, so while walking we tried to avoid the biggest puddles. At one point had to cross from the middle of the street instead of the intersection because the entire intersection was flooded. There was a little river of water running down the street, maybe just a little over a foot wide, which we had to cross. I stepped over and turned around to watch Maggie. I just assumed she'd walk through it, but then she leapt across it. A small thing, but that's the most energetic thing we've seen her do yet!

Today she played with her Kong and peanut butter some more. This time I slathered some PB not just on the ends but along the middle too. This resulted in the bone flipping away from her as she tried to get it off. As the bone moved away, she chased after it... at least until it flipped out of "her area". We have two towels down by the backdoor where she spends most of her day. In her head, she thinks she can't leave that area, so she just left the toy alone after it flipped off of the towel.

Yesterday we took her to get her nails clipped. They were very nice, but couldn't take much off of her nails. The groomer said that her nails had been allowed to grow so long that the quick was long and she couldn't cut into that. I had no idea what this meant, so did some research. The quick is the area of the nail that contains blood vessels and nerve endings. They say if we keep cutting them back a little every couple of weeks that eventually the quick will recede and we can keep her nails shorter. She was very good on her trip to the groomer. She almost seems to enjoy riding in the car. She walked in and went off with the groomer on her own with no problem. We couldn't ask for a better behaved dog.

Before the groomer, I'd taken her for a walk. I brought her inside, wiped her down, and then took her towels out to put down in the back seat of my car. I came back in, and Maggie was gone. I'd left the gate open from the family room out to the rest of the house. She'd never gone anywhere on her own before so this was a first. I found her upstairs on her bed. At least she seemed comfortable enough to go up there on her own. Just a few days ago she was terrified to go anywhere and we couldn't get her to go up the stairs.

She still won't go down the stairs so we try to keep her on the main level as much as possible to avoid having to carry her back down the stairs as few times a day as possible.

The pictures in this post are from last night. We carried her over by the couch to try to get her used to sitting somewhere else in the house. Eventually she relaxed while Kat was cuddling up with her.

In other news, my boss (Mike) and his wife (Marisa) adopted these two labs from AEAR yesterday! I'd mentioned to Mike on Monday that we got a new dog and her story. Little did I know they were looking and interested in labs or labradoodles. It's good to know that two more dogs found a great home and a loving family! This is their photo from the AEAR site.